A recent flurry
of newspaper reports made it official. They appeared in The Scotsman, The Orcadian, The Glasgow Sunday Herald, and The Times (Scottish edition). Arctic explorer
John Rae is soon to be recognized in Westminster Abbey.

David Ross,
Highland Correspondent for the Herald,
produced a quote from the Dean of Westminster, the Very Reverand Dr. John Hall.
Following discussions with Alistair Carmichael, who is Secretary of State for
Scotland and MP for Orkney and Shetland, Dr. Hall said:

"I have
agreed that a memorial should be placed to Dr John Rae of Orkney in the Abbey
near that to Sir John Franklin. I plan to dedicate a ledger stone to the Arctic
explorer in the Chapels of St John the Evangelist, St Michael and St Andrew to
the west of the North Transept on September 30." See for yourselves by clicking here.

Another excellent piece, which
appeared in The Orcadian, drew
attention to The John Rae Society website, which is conducting a fund-raising
compaign.

Many of you know all this. I
highlight it here to put it on the record. The Forces of Darkness (those who,
having a vested interest, continue to undermine John Rae) are with us still. As we approach Westminster, we
can expect a flurry of denial, distortion, and obfuscation. Nobody familiar with the three
books illustrated here -- Fatal Passage,
Lady Franklin’s Revenge, and The
Arctic Journals of John Rae -- will be surprised. John Rae lives!

James Joyce is alive and well today in Dublin. He has
surfaced in multiple incarnations and numerous places to celebrate the 110th
anniversary of Bloomsday. That’s the day -- June 16, 1904 – during which the
action of Ulysses unfolds in what
Joyce called “dear, dirty Dublin.” Rambling around the city today, everywhere
we went, we encountered people tricked out in Edwardian gear, playing characters
in the novel – Leopold and Molly Bloom, Stephen Dedalus – but also looking like
Joyce himself in middle age, when he wrote his masterpiece. The
James Joyce Centre has been celebrating all week, running Joycean walking tours
and talks, marking the 100th

anniversary (also this year) of the publication of
Dubliners, and – would you believe it? – sponsoring a Joycean Literary Pub
Crawl. The main photo on the front page of today’s Irish Times features two women participating in an egg-and-spoon
race as part of a Bizarre Bloomsday Brunch, and on Page 7 we discover another page-dominating colour photo from the festivities,
this one deriving from a street event mounted by the Here Comes Everybody
Players from Boston, Mass. At that point, we’re shading into Finnegans Wake (no apostrophe), which
features a Here-Comes-Everybody refrain that is beginning to look prophetic. The
Times also reveals that dancer
Michael Flatley, the Irish-American star of the original Riverdance, owns the bronze medal won by Joyce in a singing
competition in Dublin in 1904.

An urban myth had him throwing it into the River
Liffey in a fit of pique. As we wandered from the James Joyce Centre to Davy
Byrne’s Pub, checking out bookstore displays and sundry shenanigans, Sheena Fraser McGoogan snapped photos.

For a Torontonian, Oslo is easy to hate. Already, I have several reasons, but I will confine myself to three. Number one is Bygdoy, the “Museum Island of Oslo.” In a previous post, I mentioned the Fram Museum, which
houses both the Fram and the Gjoa, two ships that played major roles in the
exploration of the Arctic. Yes, here they are, beautifully preserved at Bygdoy,
and presented with a vast array of polar-exploration material, including even three
of my own books. How large an avalanche are we expected to handle? And today, revisiting Bygdoy, we had to deal with two equally
overwhelming experiences: the Viking Ship Museum, which houses three ships salvaged
from the 800s (not a misprint), and the
Norwegian Folk Museum, which is like Upper Canada Village or Black Creek
Village, but with a far longer history.

Bygdoy alone would make me hate this city. But Oslo offers a
welter of corollary reasons. Number two has to be the spectacular waterfront. OK, it
can’t quite compare with that of Sydney, which is arguably the most beautiful in the
world. But that is mainly because, with a metro-population of 1.5 million, Oslo
is considerably smaller. Even so, a Torontonian has to face a transit system
that works, and that includes not just buses, LRTs, and subways, but also
ferries that transport commuters up and down an eye-popping fjord to towns and
communities along the water, always in the never-ending sunshine. And the waterfront itself features a superb promenade lined with high-end restaurants,
in which you can sit and watch the passing parade of sailboats and kayaks and
cruise ships. For a Torontonian, it’s mortifying.

The third reason I hate Oslo is Edvard Munch. Everybody
knows The Scream, his most famous painting, but that is just one of numerous
towering works he created. I know this because Oslo has devoted an entire
museum to Munch, as well a vast room in the National Gallery. Munch evokes and
represents this city’s attitude towards its great artists and writers, which is
one of pride and joyful celebration. Any Torontonian, and indeed any Canadian,
knows that the appropriate posture is one of indifference and disdain. So there
you have it, three good reasons to hate Oslo: the Museum Island, the waterfront, Edvard
Munch. If those seem insufficient, we have a couple more days here, and already I see more reasons
coming.

Before turning mainly to books about arctic exploration and Canadian history, Ken McGoogan worked for two decades as a journalist at major dailies in Toronto, Calgary, and Montreal. He teaches creative nonfiction writing through the University of Toronto and in the MFA program at King’s College in Halifax. Ken served as chair of the Public Lending Right Commission, has written recently for Canada’s History, Canadian Geographic, and Maclean’s, and sails with Adventure Canada as a resource historian. Based in Toronto, he has given talks and presentations across Canada, from Dawson City to Dartmouth, and in places as different as Edinburgh, Melbourne, and Hobart.